1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to providing voting campaigns. More particularly, the present invention relates to providing a universal voting card to enhance voting campaigns utilizing cellular telephony's Short Message Service (SMS).
2. Background of the Invention
SMS is a convenient and easy to use messaging application available to users of mobile telephones and other wireless devices. SMS offers a new way to communicate by sending text or data messages between mobile phones or between a mobile phone and information devices, such as a personal computer (PC), a PDA (personal digital assistant), or a handheld email/calendar organizer. Messages are composed of words, up to 160 characters in length for Latin alphabets (about 30 to 40 words) and 70 characters for non-Latin alphabets like Arabic and Chinese. To send, text messages are keyed into a mobile phone keypad or other information device. Received text messages are presented on the mobile telephone's screen.
Introduced in Europe and the United Kingdom (U.K.) during the mid-1990s and in Asia soon thereafter, SMS encountered great enthusiasm, especially among teenagers and young adults. And although SMS had originally been conceived as a paging system, users quickly adapted text messaging for their own objectives. By the late 1990s, GSM carriers in both Europe and the U.K. had connected their networks, allowing their subscribers to exchange text messages across other GSM carriers. In 2001, 700 million mobile phone users worldwide sent 20 billion messages every month, making SMS the fastest growing service in the wireless industry.
A portion of messages that are sent via SMS are not sent to another telephone or PDA as in a Person-to-Person communication, but are instead directed to a central location. While the central location could have a regular 10-digit telephone number as does a typical mobile telephone, SMS messages directed to a central location are often so-directed using a so-called short code address. A short code address is a convenient short number that identifies a central location to which an SMS message can be sent. A typical application of short code use is Tele-voting in which, for example, a television program flashes on the screen instructions to “Send an SMS message to 8012 to vote yes.” At present, these tele-voting systems are limited to a single wireless carrier (i.e., only those that are subscribers to the wireless carrier that recognizes the short code can participate). Co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/742,764, entitled, “Universal Short Code Administration Facility” describes a system that enables short codes to be used across different wireless carriers and thereby make short codes universally available to all subscribers regardless of their wireless service provider.
Co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/837,696, entitled, “System and Method for Providing Campaign Management Services,” describes a system and method for providing a comprehensive Campaign Manager (CM) Application-Based Service (ABS). The CM ABS provides a flexible, extensible, and feature-rich campaign management platform that supports the provisioning, management, execution, and monitoring of a number of different frameworks, such as, one-way voting and two-way voting, among others, using SMS technology and infrastructure.
For example, one-way voting may involve a mobile subscriber (MS) who notices an advertisement in a newspaper describing a manufacturer's introduction of a new product. The advertisement asks the MS to vote on a favorite product color by sending an SMS message to a particular address (e.g., a Telephone Number (TN) or a short code, such as a universal short code (USC)). The campaign may specify specific codes for each color or differentiate based on free-form text provided by the MS. The MS dispatches an SMS message to the indicated address and optionally receives back a response SMS message that acknowledges the receipt of the vote. Received votes are totaled, with running totals made available for display to authorized administrators, campaign owners, etc., through, e.g. a Web-based interface. Advertisers, manufactures, marketing, and tele-voting could all benefit from such an arrangement, although, CM service is not limited to these entities.
Similarly, two-way voting extends the unidirectional aspect of a one-way voting initiative to include bi-directional ‘conversational’ communication between the MS and the CM (e.g., MS SMS message→CM, CM SMS message→MS, MS SMS message→CM, etc.). Essentially, additional information can be collected by proceeding through a series of interactive questions and responses until the communication is terminated by either the MS or the campaign.
With the technology briefly described above, numerous voting initiatives (e.g., where invitations to vote are displayed at the bottom of the screen during weekly television programs, where a contest is described on tear-off ‘tabs’ on soft drink cups at fast-food restaurants, etc.) are possible. Still more initiatives, which leverage the capabilities, features and functions of one-way voting campaigns and two-way voting campaigns, as well as those that complement such voting campaigns are desired.